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Comment by wefarrell | Hacker News Reader

"Yet the world is doing remarkably well overall, and has not suffered any of the oft-threatened giant digital catastrophes."

Totalitarian states manipulating the political processes of democratic states for their own gain is a giant digital catastrophe.

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If you are talking about the idea of Russia interfering in U.S. elections, this doesn't seem to have any thing to do with cybersecurity. The only at all credible allegations are that they used Facebook within the bounds of how Facebook is supposed to be used (when it comes to security).

The hacking of Podesta's emails were absolutely a cybersecurity issue. Spamming facebook and other social media sites with fake accounts is absolutely a cybersecurity issue - in the case of Facebook using a fake account is an unauthorized use of their platform.

There was a large social component to it, as is the case with most large cybersecurity breaches.

Podesta was phished, not hacked.

Big difference between phished and a 0day or an unpatched vulnerability. Can’t patch humans.

Google's delivery, authentication, compromise-detection, PEP management, and content encryption policies and capabilities directly contributed to the success of this attack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politically_exposed_person

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7qya12/informa...

Or just a "typo"

https://www.cnn.com/2017/06/27/politics/russia-dnc-hacking-c...

https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/13/13940514/dnc-email-hack-...

https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/310234-typo-may-hav...

Which wouldn't have mattered with the other protections in place.

The stolen emails from the Clinton campaign, leaked piecmeal, and arguably part of foreign propaganda efforts had a hell of a lot do with cybersecurity.

Hacked emails is certainly a cybersec thing, but the fact that backstage politics secrets sometimes become public is nothing new, and not necessary bad for democracy.

When a totalitarian adversary does it to aid their preferred candidate it's absolutely terrible for democracy.

Sorry, I hear "when it's against my preferred candidate it's absolutely horrible". Transparency, and informed decisions are usually claimed to be good for democracy. Hacked emails may play for this, even if done for another reason. Democratic elections are always go with dirt-digging, and spills, and it is essential part of the process even if someone doesn't like it.

In most cases dirt digging isn't usually a serious problem.

When a totalitarian adversary does it to aid their preferred candidate it is.

It's not considerable higher that in the decades before without much digitization.

But that's not an issue of cybersecurity, which is something like "Alice does not want Bob to access system X she owns, Alice follows standard procedure to secure it, Bob accesses X anyway."

In the threat model you've described, advertising and social media services were explicitly granting the agents access; they didn't circumvent the cybersecurity layer.

Edit: Maybe you can count it as social engineering, but that would only apply if e.g. Facebook is trying to enforce a policy of "No Russian election/political ad buys", but they don't seem to have a problem doing that once they decide to.

Facebook's official policy is to only allow one authentic account per person.

Still seems a stretch to lump that under cybersecurity.

Unauthorized use of any digital platform is explicitly within the realm of cybersecurity.

That fact notwithstanding, the hacking of Podesta's emails is absolutely a cybersecurity issue.

>Unauthorized use of any digital platform is explicitly within the realm of cybersecurity

Then mugging me of my smartphone is cybersecurity, and the boundary ceases to exclude anything, and we might as well just drop the "cyber" prefix.

Mugging you of your smartphone alone wouldn’t be a cybersecurity issue. Using it without your permission would be.

External influences is nothing new, and is part of politics for as long as masses opinion matters. If democracy would not able to work with it, it wouldn't exist.

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